The U.S. eugenics movement did not end with the
defeat of the Nazis but simply went underground
because public opinion had begun to turn against it.

Today, in 2014, right as a memorial to the victims of Nazi eugenics is being unveiled in Berlin, the U.S. and many other countries continue to run a hidden U.S.-inspired crypto-eugenic program with the misguided aim to prevent blindness in premature babies by suffocating them so that they don't have to grow up blind.

This program has by now been going on for sixty
years. According to often cited but probably low-balled medical estimates, it killed 150,000 children in its first two decades, and it still shows no sign of abating. Just as the Nazi doctors tried to run their euthanasia program in secret, the current medical community denies the facts about this hidden asphyxiation routine but has never been able to refute any of the
documentation.

Yet, the indifference and credulity of the modern public allows this eugenics crime to continue unchallenged, amid much talk about bemoaning the past eugenic crimes and "never again" rhetoric about preventing future ones. Here is what happened and still happens:

During the heyday of the American eugenics
movement before WW2, when the secret killing of
"defectives" was seen as a tacit medical right and sometimes even duty, blindness became a major
target of the defect hunters. Although the popular appeal of eugenics tanked as Americans learned about the Nazi atrocities committed in its name, the U.S. doctors who had eagerly absorbed this pseudo-science during their study years continued to follow its precepts but did so less openly than its current advocates who propose to abort fetuses diagnosed with Down's syndrome.

After the war, some of the most rabid eugenicists
among them had a chance to apply what they still
believed was their "science". Beginning in 1940, the year after the commercial introduction of fluorescent lamps, premature babies began to suffer from a new form of eye damage that had never been observed before but became soon the major cause of childhood blinding. Although already the discoverer of that new blindness type had suggested that light was its most likely reason, he soon died, and his most influential
colleagues blamed instead the "defective germ plasm" of the afflicted babies.

See http://retinopathyofprematurity.org/20oxygeneugenics.htm for the full documentation of these facts.

In a 1948 meeting, these ophthalmologists suggested the babies' doctors should not be "so zealous in preserving these defectives", and they soon rigged a major clinical experiment in 1954/55 to translate this callous proposal into medical dogma. The major means for "preserving" the lives of premature babies was, and still is, to provide them breathing help with supplemental oxygen.

Knowing that the infants with the most vulnerable eyes were also those with the most immature lungs, the experimenters withheld this "undeserved subsidy" of "liberal" oxygen from virtually all of the infants in the 18 study hospitals for the first two days and thereby predictably killed the weakest among them. Then only did they enroll the survivors and reported that almost none of those developed the eye damage.

Despite this heavy thumb on the risk-weighing scale, these doctors also falsely claimed with much pomp and "scientific" authority that they had achieved this cure for the epidemic without increasing the mortality rate.

Accordingly, their oxygen rationing became instantly the new medical routine in nurseries around the world -- although the doctors there knew well that oxygen had been given to preemies in generous amounts for many decades without ever damaging any of their eyes.

Yet, despite this knowledge, all nursery doctors
accepted and zealously applied the new restrictions, including those in Catholic hospitals that supposedly should have opposed this eugenic expediency. Some two decades later, an examination of the actual mortality rates revealed that the oxygen withholding had killed at least 150,000 premature babies, and that
each case of blindness prevented had cost 16 deaths.

For the detailed story, and the falsely denied evidence for the blinding from the fluorescent nursery lights, see http://retinopathyofprematurity.org/01summary.htm and the pages linked to it there.

However, even this dismal result from the first 20 years did not lead to a fundamental re-assessment of the oxygen policy or to any inquiry into this surreptitious medical mass-murder, only to a slight relaxation of its severity. The basic baby suffocation routine continues to this day although none of the many later studies ever confirmed the initial bogus
claim of preventing blindness without risking lives.

The latest of these studies, called SUPPORT in the U.S., was conducted from 2005 to 2009 and predictably killed 23 "extra" babies in the low-oxygen group. The researchers had to lie to the parents about this known risk because no parent would or could have knowingly accepted to offer their child for this cruel and dangerous experiment.

Never mind the Nuremberg Code and other pious
declarations of medical research ethics that expressly forbid such deceptions and that were developed in response to the eugenic programs and experiments of the infamous Nazi doctors. As the current proposals by Dawkins and Singer and others for the elimination of children with Down's syndrome and other "unfit" vividly show, the spirit of those criminal eugenicists is still very much alive.

See http://retinopathyofprematurity.org/KnowinglyHarmfulMedicalResearch.htm

All the condemnations of the past eugenics crimes and pious promises to prevent them from recurring sound hollow and hypocritical as long as this ongoing crime is allowed to continue its hidden killing spree.